JLC

CHAPTER ONE (first four pages) establishes voice and setting and introduces the family I am seven in my bedroom on 90 Charles Street in NYC. I share a room with my little brother Zeph who is three. It is summer. It is boiling hot. There is no air-conditioning. There are no fans. There are screens in the open windows. The air is heavy inside. Even the plastic furniture is sweating. I am sticky. Daddy says “Wear a wet T-shirt, it is perfectly good air-conditioning.” We go to bed with wet hair and wet T-shirts on. The windows of our bedroom open onto the street. I fall asleep listening to everyone’s conversations as they drift into the screened windows. It is winter. Every time a car rolls by, the windows shake in our bedroom and all the cold air and street life comes inside even when the windows are closed. There is a police station on the next block over. People walk by all night, drunk, talking loudly and also not drunk talking quietly. I can hear everything they say. I wake up in the middle of the night. Something is different. It is completely silent. The clock says it is 4AM. I get up and go to the window. There is snow everywhere. It is piled high on the cars, fluttering down. There are no tire marks on the street. I am leaning over the radiator to look down the street in both directions. The radiator is nice and warm. The snow is white and beautiful. Suddenly there is a loud scraping noise of metal on the cement. Daddy is shoveling the snow in front of the house. His coat is open. He is still dressed in yesterday’s clothes. Daddy hasn’t gone to sleep yet. I am 10. Zeph and I eat supper early with each other and Mommy sits with us, to keep us company, and makes sure we remember our table manners. Mommy doesn’t eat anything. Later, when we are about to go to bed, Mommy makes dinner for herself and Daddy. She calls out to Daddy from the kitchen, “It's time to wash the salad!" The salad is many different kinds of green salad: arugula, boston, frisee’, etc. Daddy takes a bit of each kind and puts it on the counter. He fills a dedicated white plastic basin in the sink with water. He swishes the salad around in the basin with his hands. Then he picks up a nice quantity in both hands and shakes it very vigorously many times. Then he sets it on a clean dish towel and pats the salad dry. He puts it in a huge clear plastic bowl. This is the first part of his salad job. Mommy dresses the salad. This is part II. She salts the salad, squeezes the juice of half a lemon into the serving spoon, and dumps it in, and adds two serving spoons of extra virgin olive oil. Daddy is responsible for part III: mix the salad. He tastes it to make sure it is right. This is the salad routine. Mommy establishes routines where other people are responsible for micro-portions of a project and depend on her direction to be able to finish it. In this case Mommy buys the salad, Daddy washes the salad, Mommy dresses the salad and Daddy mixes the salad. They eat salad with their dinner, 365 days a year. This is why salad is a routine. Mommy and Daddy like to be called Julie and Henry. I categorically refuse to do this but Zeph complies. “Everyone has a Mommy and Daddy but Julie and Henry are unique,” Mommy and Daddy explain. This makes no sense. According to how I see it, while it is true that every child calls his mother “Mommy” or some version of it, everyone has only one Mommy and Daddy and so in fact, in the world there are only two people— me and Zeph— who can Call Mommy “Mommy” and Daddy “Daddy." Zeph is not with my program, so I do my own program. I do not call Mommy “Julie” or Daddy “Henry.” Forget it. When I say “Mommy," Mommy interrupts me and says “Julie," and when I say “Daddy," Daddy says “Henry." I am 58. Friends always remark that it is infantile to call my parents Mommy and Daddy. They say an adult should call their mother and father “Mom” and “Dad”. They are and always have been Mommy and Daddy. For Zeph and his children, they are and always have been Julie and Henry. This is how it is. I am 19. I am visiting from college. Mommy calls Daddy to wash the salad. Daddy does not answer. Mommy says to me. “Henry is in the cellar working, go get him." The cellar has rickety steps going down, no daylight and no ventilation. It has very low ceilings. It is winter. The basement is warm because the boiler room is very hot. Daddy sits in a folding garden chair. His legs straddle the middle legs of the ping-pong table which is now his desk. The entire ping-pong table is cluttered with papers. There is a bare bulb with a metal chain to tug to turn it on and off. The bulb is attached to the ceiling and shines a dull light down over the table. The lighting is dismal. There is the mess, the dark, the lack of a window. It is a dreary scenario. Daddy has his own desk and a desk chair by a window upstairs. “Daddy it’s so much nicer upstairs, why are you down here?," I ask. Daddy looks up. “How does the duck get out of the bottle?” he answers. I am totally lost. “How does a duck get in the bottle?” I ask. “The problem postulates that the duck is already in the bottle," he replies firmly. “Think about it," he suggests. Daddy is a mathematician. I take advantage of “think about it” to exit the conversation, “Mommy wants you to wash the salad,” I tell him. I am 40. I am visiting Mommy and Daddy. It’s time to wash the salad. Daddy is nowhere to be found. I go down to the cellar to find Daddy. The ping-pong table is full of papers about six inches high and up to two feet high in the middle. The table is sinking at the net. The bare lightbulb with the metal cord is on. Daddy is in the garden chair, his legs straddle the ping-pong table legs. He looks up “How does the duck get out of the bottle?” “I give up," I say. “The duck is out of the bottle," he responds. I hate the part where the answer makes even less sense than the question. I am 56. Daddy is at the end of his life. He tells me a story about his childhood. “Uncle George and I learn to swim in Little Rock Arkansas. When we get off the boat at Ellis Island we go to our Uncle Doc. We learn to swim there because Uncle Doc teaches us. We are really good swimmers, really good. In fact, your Uncle George goes on to swim in college. “ My Uncle George is almost 90 now and still swims. “I came down with the flu. Shortly before getting sick, I took a book out of the library about how to swim, written by a champion swimmer at the time. I was sick so I studied the book really hard. When I got better I went back to the pool to enact all that I learned from the book. I was never a good swimmer again. “ “The moral of the story is not to study some things too hard.” He tells me. Could the moral of the duck in the bottle story be not to study some things too hard? I am 9. Whenever I finish my homework, or have nothing to do, I sit on our front stoop. Zeph comes with me. He has a math problem workbook he works on while we “stoop sit." I watch people walk by and invent stories about their lives by examining how they are dressed and who they are talking to. There are regulars on the street. We greet each other. There are no cell phones. Zeph solves math problems. I people-watch. 90 Charles Street is where I live until I go to college. It is where Zeph is born and grows up. Mommy and Daddy live there until they die. I visit it and them all the time. 90 Charles Street is our house. ——————— I am 55, Mommy is recovering from a stroke. She says, “I feel like I am in a wonderful novel, but I know I will never get to see how it ends." Mommy believes that when we die, kaput. It is over. She says she is a feminist and an atheist. This sums up what she thinks. I don’t think so. I talk to dead people and they talk to me. I am 18. I am in college. Aunt Peggy, Mommy’s older sister, has a brain tumor. The brain tumor makes her love contests. These are in Reader’s Digest or coupon books, and winning them is rather roundabout. First we have to solve a quiz, then we mail in our answer. If we answer right, we are placed in a drawing for a prize. First prize is a cruise. We work very hard on winning the opportunity to be drawn in a lottery. Of course we could just buy a scratch and win for more immediate satisfaction, but it turns out that when my aunt has a brain tumor, I don’t think of that. She doesn’t either. Contests are a way of being together. Six months after Peggy dies, I receive a package. Inside is a white teddy bear with an angel's wreath on its head. There is a note and it says “From one angel to another." The note is not signed. I decide to call the bear “Angel Bear." ( I like naming practices that are unambiguous and unimaginative: Mommy and Daddy and Angel Bear). “Angel Bear” turns out to be a contest prize that suffered from some supply chain malfunction. So Angel Bear carries my first message from a dead person: “From one angel to another.” Baba is my grandmother on my mother’s side, she is the second dead person I know and communicate with. Baba and my grandfather Pa live in a huge six bedroom house in Scarsdale, New York, with antique furniture and silverware. Pa is sick so I don’t see him much. He is in his room with a nurse. It is “Baba’s house." It has high ceilings, a kitchen the size of my entire first apartment, dark wood beams in the ceilings and a huge fireplace. It looks like the kind of house that should have moose heads here and there. But Scarsdale has no real nature, just manicured lawns, and rabbits and squirrels that bounce on them. We go to Baba’s house every single weekend growing up. Baba’s house has welcoming smells. She cooks roasts and bakes potatoes and keeps treats under this big orange bell, treats like Entemann’s brownies. It is mouth watering to walk in. Entemann’s brownies don’t have a smell, but they are still mouth watering. In fact, my first steps when I walk in the kitchen door are to lift the bell and look at the treat, and peek in the oven. While the downstairs is mouth watering and is cozy, the upstairs is scary. I always get this panicked feeling when it is time to walk up the red carpeted stairs and go to my bedroom. It feels like someone is chasing me. So I dash up the stairs and then whip around breathless to make sure whoever is chasing me is gone. No one is ever there. I am 20. Baba dies in her sleep in her bedroom. While Baba is at her own funeral some robbers come to her house on a motorcycle and steal all the silverware and her diamond wedding ring. The silver is monogrammed and heavy. The police know the thief came on a motorcycle because it left just one tire mark on the manicured lawn. It is a real surprise to me that robbers on motorcycles read the obituaries in the Scarsdale Enquirer, the local paper. I am 58. Mommy and Daddy are no longer with us. I am still in the middle of the novel of life that Mommy says she never gets to finish. I still converse with Mommy and Daddy on a daily basis, so I use the present tense to tell stories about them. All of this is terribly confusing to others of course. Baba is dead and thieves read obituaries. The only person I know who adores obituaries is my father. Daddy loves them. He begins every morning over every breakfast reading the obituary section. Thanks to mortality, the New York Times has a steady supply of dead people to read about. Daddy finishes reading the paper to himself and then tells us we have to “listen to this," and reads it out loud. When he puts down the paper he says “isn’t that amazing?" Despite his passionate reading of obituaries, Daddy did not steal the silverware. I know this for a fact because Daddy was at the funeral. He also does not ride motorcycles anymore. The only things he “steals” from anywhere, he finds in the garbage. So this proves that there are two types of obituary readers out there: the Daddy style —admirer of dead people in the New York Times, and the motorcycle robber style, looking for monogrammed silver and diamond rings. So now we know that robbers read obituaries and bother to keep track of funeral arrangements. Thanks to Baba dying, the obituary in the Scarsdale Enquirer and the robbery, Mommy got a handle on how this works. Now when someone dies, Mommy makes sure that someone stays at home to call 911 when the robbers break in to steal the silverware, which of course, if they were to succeed, is not there anymore.

STORY STATEMENT A fresh take on the American Jewish experience and the immigrant experience more broadly, “90 Charles Street” is a vivid portrait of an eccentric, dysfunctional, loving family navigating intergenerational trauma. SKETCH Jennifer’s father, Henry, is a devout Orthodox Jew and a brilliant mathematician and Bell Laboratiories. His childhood was spent in prison in a Soviet Labor Camp in Siberia. Her mother, Julie, is both an avowed atheist and at the same time an Orthodox Jewish mother. Jennifer is a quiet rebel who constantly questions the way things are. In contrast, her brother Zeph follows in his father’s footsteps as a mathematician while re-enacting Henry and Julie’s dynamics. BREAKOUT TITLE 90 Charles Street GENRE AND COMPARABLES Genre: Personal narrative Comp: Backman, Fredrik, A Man Called Ove Comp: Cisneros, Sandra, The House on Mango Street. LOGLINE 90 Charles Street is the real story of a family and their house, one that will touch many hearts because it resonates with the life-affirming struggles of families everywhere to raise children, go grocery shopping, take care of a home, to age and manage grief. The story narrates Jennifer’s growing understanding of the complex emotional lives of her family. Family coping strategies include the practice of Jovial Unhappiness, the belief that the Past is Unpredictable and the conviction that Mathematics in the One Irrefutable Right Answer. OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT The secrets unspoken truths and tragedy create a searing yet hopeful story about coming of age. The small events of daily life come together to inform the big world view questions of power, religion, men and women, identity and culture. SETTING The primary setting is 90 Charles Street. Other settings are grandmother’s house, and vacations. At the end, 90 Charles Street reveals itself as a sentient, hidden, broken ally to the Landau family. Home is celebrated.